Double Down

Professional poker player Tim Waverly, hounded by the local crime boss and pursued by an assassin, stands to lose his life unless he can come up with the tremendous amount of cash he needs to buy himself out of trouble

Introduced in the taut Michigan Roll , professional card player Tim Waverly is now hiding in Palm Beach while his partner, Bennie Epstein, hopes to save their lives by promising to pay back the Chicago crime boss whose delivery of heroin Tim sent up in smoke. Bennie returns with bad news: they have to turn over an additional $300,000 in two weeks or they will be killed. Neither of these worldly-wise ex-cons believes they'll be left alive even if they cough up the cash, but due to Kakonis's expert characterization, readers will believe simultaneously in the pair's weary hopelessness and their indomitable will to survive. Naturally, poker figures prominently in their plan as Tim joins a round of high-stake games with a group of overextended developers, among whom is an old childhood friend. Kakonis builds exquisite tension as Bennie and Tim, who becomes involved with the friend's wife, must outwit the pair of guns tailing them. Steamy with high-rent, low-life atmosphere, resolved in a violent shoot-out, the tale features an unforgettable cast, notably the belly-scratching thug from Chicago whose delight in junk food and women offsets the cool, pristine habits of the assassin he's apprenticed to. Aptly likened to Elmore Leonard, Kakonis offers a slightly darker vision. Serial rights to Penthouse.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cracking good crime thriller that resurrects both the gambling hero of Kakonis's Michigan Roll (1988) and the exhilaratingly tough yet deeply humane storytelling that made that first novel one of the most memorable in recent crime fiction. While his canny older partner Bennie Epstein is in Chicago trying to mollify Carl Dietz, the top mobster that Timothy Waverly burned for 500,000 ``balloons'' in Michigan Roll, Waverly is holed up in a shoddy Palm Beach motel--not the kind of place to show off to Caroline Crown, the childhood sweetheart he runs into on a nearby street. But Waverly soon has bigger concerns than a rekindled old flame, even if she is married to his oldest friend: Dietz wants to be paid back in full, with a heavy interest, and- -Waverly correctly suspects--plans to ice the gambler and his pal anyway after the two-week payback period is over. In fact, Dietz has set on Waverly's tail two shooters--anal-retentive, super-slick muscleman D'Marco Fontaine, and D'Marco's ``cross to bear,'' slobby, shlubby apprentice Sigurd Stumpley--whose odd-couple squabblings give the high-energy narrative some of the most inspired dark-slapstick moments this side of Carl Hiaasen. With D'Marco and Sig shadowing his every move, Waverly still manages bittersweetly to romance the unhappily married Caroline and to get her husband to introduce him to some high-rolling businessmen- -portrayed with an acid pen by Kakonis--and to their backer, a card-sharking-and-cheating Arab prince. In a series of high-tension poker marathons, Waverly watches his chance to pay back Dietz-- who's meanwhile flown to Palm Beach to monitor the kill--rise and then fall to nothing--leading to a wild chase-and-shoot in a deserted hotel, and a brutal, high-body-count climax. Naggingly similar in plot to Michigan Roll, but even more inspired in its wry and compassionate portrait of desperate men: any way you cut it, this one comes up aces. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.